This article was originally published
in The Development of the Drama. Brander Matthews. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912. pp. 263-295.

EVERYWHERE in Europe the modern drama has been evolved from
out the drama of the middle ages; but the development had been
slower in France than in Spain and in England; and this retarding
of its evolution was fortunate for the French, since the golden
days of their dramatic literature arrived only after the conditions
of the theater had become far less medieval than they had been
during the golden days of the Spanish and of the English dramatic
literatures. It was natural that the more modern form of play
should be taken as a model by the poets of other countries, the
more especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when
the French were everywhere accepted as the arbiters of art, the
custodians of taste, and the guardians of the laws by which genius
was to be gaged. In England the Puritans had closed the places
of amusement and had thus broken off the theatrical traditions
that ran far back into the middle ages; and when the playhouses
opened again after the Restoration,
the managers had to gratify new likings which king and courtiers
had brought back with them from France. Even though the plain
people in London continued to prefer the plays of Shakespeare
to belauded adaptations from Corneille
or Racine and to icily decorous imitations
like the CATO of Addison, and even though the plebeian
folk in Madrid still relished the plays of Lope
de Vega and Calderon, the English
men-of-letters and the Spanish men-of-letters were united in
taking an apologetic tone toward the earlier dramas which had
pleased their less cultivated forefathers. In England as in Spain
the learned critic was willing to admit that these earlier dramas
had a certain rough power which might move the uneducated, but
he had no desire to deny that they wanted art. For instance,
Doctor Johnson, when he brought out his edition of Shakespeare
in the middle of the eighteenth century and when he ventured
a timid suggestion that possibly the so-called rules of the theater
were not absolutely infallible, seems to have felt almost as
though he was taking his life in his hands.

In Italy and in Germany, as in England and in Spain, the men-of-letters
maintained the necessity of conforming to the theatrical theory
of the French because they believed the French to be the only
true exponents of the Greek tradition, which it was the bounden
duty of every dramatic poet to follow blindly. The rules of the
theater as the French declared them had only a remote connection
with the Greek tradition; and they consisted mainly of purely
negative restrictions. They told the dramatic poet what he was
forbidden to do, and they declared what a tragedy must not be.
To accord with the demands of the French theory a tragedy should
not have more or less than five acts and it should not be in
prose; it should deal only with a lofty theme, having queens
and kings for its chief figures, and avoiding all visible violence
of action or of speech, and all other breaches of decorum; it
should eschew humor, keeping itself ever serious and stately,
and never allowing any underplot; and, above all, it should permit
no change of scene during the whole play, and it should not allow
the time taken by the story to extend over more than twenty-four
hours.

These were the rules to conform to which Corneille cramped
himself and curbed his indisputable genius, with the result that
he is to Shakespeare "as a clipped hedge is to a forest,"--to
quote an unsympathetic British critic. A certain likeness to
the virgin woods is discoverable in the Elizabethan drama, whereas
the drama of Louis XIV resembles rather a pleasure-park laid
out by some such architect as Lenôtre. French tragedy had
a graceful symmetry of its own, but it was lacking in bold variety
and in imaginative energy. Here is an added reason why it was
widely accepted in the eighteenth century, which has been termed
"an age whose poetry was without romance" and "whose
philosophy was without insight." The century itself, rather
than the French example, is to blame if it has left so few poetic
plays deserving to survive. What Lowell called "its inefficacy
for the higher reaches of poetry, its very good breeding that
made it shy of the raised voice and the flushed features of enthusiasm,"
enabled the century to make its prose supple for the elegancies
of the social circle and for the literature which sought to reflect
those elegancies. "Inevitably, as human intercourse in cities
grows more refined, comedy will grow more subtle," so De
Quincey declared; "it will build itself on distinctions
of character less grossly defined and on features of manners
more delicate and impalpable."

II

A FLEXIBLE prose is plainly the fittest instrument for the
comedy-of-manners; and the comedy-of-manners is as plainly the
kind of drama best suited to the limitations of the eighteenth
century. By their comedies rather than by their tragedies are
the dramatists of that century now remembered. Their comedies,
like their tragedies, were composed in imitation of French models;
but the influence of Molière
was as stimulating as the influence of Corneille and Racine had
been stifling. Within a few years after Molière's death
the type of comedy which he had elaborated to suit his own needs
and to contain his veracious portrayal of life as he saw it,
had been taken across to England by the comic dramatists of the
Restoration, some of whom had borrowed plots from him and all
of whom had tried to absorb his method. No one of the English
dramatists had Molière's insight into character or his
sturdy morality. Congreve and Wycherley,
Farquhar and Vanbrugh helped themselves
to Molière's framework only to hang it about with dirty
linen. At times Molière had been plain of speech, but
he was ever clean-minded; whereas the English dramatists of the
Restoration were often foul in phrase and frequently filthy in
thought also.

Clever as these Restoration comedies were and brilliant in
their reflection of the glittering immorality, their tone was
too offensive for our modern taste, and scarcely one of them
now survives on the stage. Yet the form they had copied from
Molière they firmly established in England, where the
conditions of the theater had come to be like those in France;
and this form has been accepted by all the later comic dramatists
of our language, who have never cared to return to the looser
and more medieval form which had to satisfy the humorous playwrights
under Elizabeth. Steele and Fielding and, later in the century,
Goldsmith and Sheridan continue in English comedy the tradition
established by Molière. In SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
and in THE RIVALS there is an element of rolicking farce
not quite in keeping with the elevation of high comedy but not
unlike the joyous gaiety which laughs all through the IBOURGEOIS
GENTILHOMME. In the SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL we have
an English comedy with something like the solid structure of
the FEMMES SAVANTES, but narrower in its outlook, not
so piercing in its insight, and far more metallic in its luster.

The English followers of Molière are many, but they
are not more numerous or more amusing than those who in his own
country profited by the example he had left. Regnard is almost
the equal of his master in adroitness of versification and even
in comic force, in the power of compelling laughter. MONSIEUR
DE POURCEAUGNAC has hardly added more to the mirth of the
French than has the LÉGATAIRE UNIVERSAL. But Regnard
is fantastic and arbitrary in the conduct of his plots; and he
lacks the truth to life and the penetration which characterize
Molière. Lesage comes nearer, in his knowledge of human
nature and in his appreciation of its frailties, although it
is in his novels rather than in his plays that he reveals himself
most fully as a disciple of Molière. Like Fielding in
England, Lesage in France carried over into prose fiction the
method of character-drawing which he had acquired from the greatest
of all comic dramatists.

In the DÉPIT AMOUREUX and in the ÉCOLE
DES FEMMES Molière had shown how to set on the stage
certain more delicate phases of feminine personality; Marivaux
pushed the analysis still further, thereby enriching French comedy
with a series of studies of women in love,--women at once ethereal,
sophisticated, and fascinating. Broader than Marivaux was Beaumarchais,
broader and franker; his psychology was swifter, his action more
direct, and his stagecraft was more obvious. It was TARTUFFE
and the ÉTOURDI that he had taken as his models,
but he was only clever and wily where Molière was transparently
sincere; and instead of the large liberality of the dramatist
under Louis XIV the dramatist under Louis XVI had a caustic skepticism.
The career of Beaumarchais was as varied in its vicissitudes
as that of his own Figaro; he was an adventurer himself, like
Sheridan, his contemporary on the other side of the Channel.
The BARBER OF SEVILLE was as lively and as vivacious as
the RIVALS; and the MARRIAGE OF FIGARO was as scintillating
and as hard as the SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL.

There was a disintigrating satire in these comedies of Beaumarchais,
a daring bitterness of attack like that of a reckless journalist
who might happen also to be an ingenious and witty playwright.
Where Molière had assaulted hypocrisy in religion and
humbug in medicine, Beaumarchais made an onslaught on the Ancient
Regime as a whole. No doubt a portion of the vogue Beaumarchais
enjoyed among his contemporaries was due to their covert sympathy
with the thesis he was so cleverly sustaining on the stage. He
knew how to profit by the scandal aroused by his scathing insinuations
against the established order. Yet he was not dependent on these
factitious aids, and his solidly constructed comedies reveal
remarkable dramaturgic felicity. They have established themselves
firmly on the French stage, where they are still seen with pleasure,
although certain polemic passages here and there strike us now
as extraneous and as over-vehement. Beaumarchais is the connecting-link
between the French comedy of the seventeenth century and that
of the nineteenth, between Molière and Augier.

III

ALTHOUGH the French theorists insisted on a complete separation
of the comic and the tragic, disapproving fiercely of any humorous
relief in a tragedy, they also maintained that comedy should
hold itself aloof from vulgar subjects, that it should ever be
genteel; and there were some who held that it ought to be unfailingly
dignified. Even in England Goldsmith was reproached for having
disfigured SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER with scenes of broad
humor "to low even for farce"; and Sheridan in the
prologue of the RIVALS felt forced to make a plea for
laughter as a not unnatural accompaniment of comedy. without
asserting categorically that the drama should be strenuously
didactic, many critics considered that it was the duty of comedy,
not first of all to depict human nature as it is with its foibles
and its failings, and not to clear the air with hearty laughter
wholesome in itself, but chiefly to teach, to set a good example,
to hold aloft the standards of manners and of morals. Dryden
had declared that the general end of all poetry was "to
instruct delightfully"; and not a few later writers of less
authority were willing enough to waive the delight if only they
could make sure of their instruction.

Thus there came into existence a new dramatic species, which
flourished for a little space on both sides of the English Channel
and which was known in London as sentimental-comedy and in Paris
as tearful-comedy, comédie larmoyante. The most
obvious characteristic of this comedy was that it was not comic;
and in fact it was not intended to be comic, but pathetic. It
was a mistake that a play of this new class should call itself
comedy, which was precisely what it was not, and that by this
false claim it should hinder the healthy growth of true comedy
with its ampler pictures of life and its contagious gaiety. But
the new species, however miscalled, responded to a new need of
the times. It was the result of that awakening sensibility of
the soul, of that growing tenderness of spirit, of that expansion
of sympathy, which was after a while to bring about the Romanticist
upheaval.

In England this sentimental-comedy never amounted to much,
even though it had for one of its earliest practitioners Steele,
who claimed that a certain play of his had been "damned
for its piety." But Steele, undeniable humorist as he was,
lacked the instinctive touch of the born playwright, and his
humor was too delicate to adjust itself easily to the huge theaters
of London. Steele's is the only interesting name in all the list
of writers for the English stage who intended to edify rather
than to amuse and who did not regret that their comedies called
for tears rather than laughter. That the liking for sentimental-comedy
was more transient in England than in France perhaps was due
to the fact that the Londoners had already wept abundantly over
dramas of an irregular species, not comedies of course, nor yet
true tragedies, but dealing pathetically with the humbler sort
of people. Of this irregular species Lillo's GEORGE BARNWELL
and Moore's GAMESTER may serve as specimens. Difficult
to classify as these plays may have been, they were moving in
their appeal to the emotions of the London citizens; and they
must be accepted as spontaneous attempts at a kind of play which
the French later in the century were to strive for under the
name of tragédie bourgeoise, the tragedy of common
life, with no vain tinsel of royalty and no false perspective
of antiquity.

In France, where comedy and tragedy were more rigorously restricted
than in England, the vogue of sentimental-comedy was less fleeting,
sustained as it was by the sudden success of the pathetic plays
of La Chaussée and by the ardent proclamations of Diderot.
With all his intelligence, Diderot failed to write a single good
play of his own; but he was swift to see that the prescribed
molds of tragedy and comedy, as the French theorists had established
them, were not only too narrow but above all too few for a proper
representation of the infinite variety of human life. Envying
the larger liberty of the English theater and approving of the
comédie larmoyante and the tragédie bougeoise,
he demanded a frank recognition of the right of these new species
not only to exist but also to be received as the equals of tragedy
and comedy. Unfortunately Diderot could not sustain precept by
example; his own attempts at play-writing were painfully unsatisfactory,
and the tearful-comedies of La Chaussée were poor things
at best, even though they had won favor for a little while. Perhaps
the most pleasing example of French sentimental-comedy was Sedaine's
PHILOSOPHE SANS LE SAVOIR; and in spite of its amiable
optimism and its touching situations, the tone of this innocent
little play was thin, and its manner was rather argumentative
than appealing.

IV

IF we needed proof of the temporary popularity of the ingenuous
domestic drama which pretended to be comedy, although it preferred
tears to laughter, we could find this in the fact that it tempted
even Voltaire to essay it. Yet for sentimental-comedy it would
seem as though Voltaire had few natural qualifications, since
he was deficient in sentiment, in pathos, and in humor. Wit he
had in profusion,--indeed, he was the arch-wit of the century;
and he was so amazingly clever that when he attempted tragedy
he was able to make his wit masquerade even as poetry. In the
drama, as in almost every other department of literature, Voltaire
is the dominating figure of this time. He was very fond of the
theater, and he had possessed himself of some of the secrets
of the dramaturgic art. He could devise an ingenious story; but
he had no firm mastery of human motive. However artfully his
plots might be put together, they were generally improbable in
the main theme and arbitrary in the several episodes.

Even his best tragedy, ZAÏRE, which is less of
an improvisation than most of his other plays, and which still
has an intermittent vitality on the French stage, was little
more than a melodrama, as the characters existed soley for the
situations by which they were created. Although his versification
was feeble, and although he was never truly a poet, he was sometimes
really eloquent. As a dramatist he was often self-conscious,
not to say insincere; his mind was on the minor effects of the
stage and not on the larger problems of the soul. His conception
of tragedy was petty; it was without elevation or austerity;
and yet he thought that the French had been able to improve on
the type of tragedy which they had borrowed from the Greeks.
He did not see that French tragedy, vaunting itself so absolutely
Greek, had acquired from the Spanish drama a trick of complicating
its plot with ingenious surprises, than which nothing could be
more foreign to the large simplicity of the Athenian drama. He
did not percieve that what his countrymen had been trained to
expect and to admire in the tragic drama "was a set of circumstances
peculiar to that play, with a set of characters common to all
French plays in general,--the mesdames et seigneurs of the Spanish
CID of Corneille, the Jewish ATHALIE of Racine,
and the Grecian MÉROPE of Voltaire" himself.

How widely the ideal of tragedy upheld by the French dramatists
under Louis XV differed from that pursued by the English playwrights
under Elizabeth, and also from that followed by the Greek poets
under Pericles,
was made plain by Voltaire's own formal declaration in which
he set up a standard of tragedy as he understood it: "To
compact an illustrious and interesting event into the space of
two or three hours; to make the characters appear only when they
ought to come forth; never to leave the stage empty; to put together
a plot as probable as it is attractive; to say nothing unnecessary;
to instruct the mind and move the heart; to be always eloquent
in verse with the eloquence proper to each character represented;
to speak one's tongue with the same purity as in the most chastened
prose, without allowing the effort of rhyming to seem to hamper
the thought; to permit no single line to be hard or obscure or
declamatory;--these are the conditions which nowadays one insists
upon in a tragedy." From this explicit definition it is
evident that Voltaire regarded tragedy as a work of the intelligence
rather than of the imagination; and it might even be inferred
that he distrusted the imagination, and that he thought that
the intelligence could be aided in the accomplishment of its
task by the rules.

The rules of the theater, including that of the Three Unities,
had been adopted in France in the seventeenth century largely
because Corneille had given his adhesion to them, although they
held him in bondage he could not but feel; and they were maintained
in France in the eighteenth century very largely because of the
authority of Voltaire, who was ever ready to reproach Corneille
for every chance dereliction and to denounce Shakespeare for
every open disregard of dramatic decorum. The weight of Voltaire's
authority was acknowledged not only in France but throughout
Europe. His plays were translated and acted in the various languages
of civilization; and his opinions about the theater were received
with acquiescence in Italy, in Germany, and in England. It is
true that in England, while the professed critics deplored the
lamentable lack of taste shown by their rude forefathers, they
themselves continued to enjoy the actual performances of the
vigorous plays of the Elizabethan dramatists. It is true that
in Italy the men-of-letters who accepted the rulings of Voltaire
could take little more than an academic interest in the drama,
since their theater was not flourishing, and even the comedy-of-masks
seemd to be wearing itself out. It is true that in Germany also
the theater was in a sorry condition, and that the German actors
were often forced to perform in adaptations of French plays in
default of native dramas worthy of consideration.

Charming as are certain of the comedies of Goldoni,
they are slight in texture and superficial in character; and
it is significant that Goldoni himself felt it advisable to leave
his native land and to go to Paris to push his fortunes. Significant
is it also of the increasing cosmopolitanism of the theater toward
the end of the century that the plot of one of Goldoni's Italian
comedies was utilized by Voltaire, whose French play was adapted
into English by the elder Colman. Lofty as are the tragedies
of Alfieri they have a scholarly rigidity as if they were intended
rather for the closet than the stage, although the simplicity
of their structure has made it possible to present them in the
actual theater. Italy in the eighteenth century was sunk in corruption
or busy with petty intrigue; and it was devoid of the energy
of will which is the vital element of the drama. Not only was
there little expectation or even hope of national unity; there
was in fact but little solidarity of feeling among those who
spoke the language. The French people, and the English also,
were each of them conscious of their nationality and proud of
it; but the Italians were like the Germans in having neither
pride nor consciousness. Italy was only a geographical expression
then; and no fervid lyrist had yet proclaimed the large limits
of the German fatherland. The Italians and the Germans, whatever
their merits as individuals, were then as peoples too infirm
of purpose and too lax of will to be ripe for an outflowering
of the drama such as might follow hard upon the achievement of
national unity and the establishment of a national capital. Very
important indeed is the contribution which a city can make to
the development of a dramatic literature; and not only in Athens
but also Madrid, London, and Paris have deserved well of all
lovers of the drama.

V

ALTHOUGH the Germans had then no center of national life and
had not yet felt the need of it, they had given more proof of
resolution than the Italians; and it was in the eighteenth century
that Frederick laid the firm foundation of the national unity
to be achieved more than a century later. It was in Germany again
that there arose a stalwart antagonist to withstand Voltaire,
to destroy the universal belief in the infallibility of French
criticism, and to disestablish the pseudo-classicism which needed
to be swept aside before a rebirth of the drama was possible.
Lessing was the best equipped and the
most broad-minded critic of aesthetic theory who had come forward
since Aristotle; and he had not a little of the great Greek's
commingled keenness and common sense. The German critic was not
so disinterested as Aristotle; indeed, what strikes us now as
the sole defect of his stimulating study of the drama is its
polemic tone. It was in the stress of a contemporary controversy
that Lessing set forth eternal principles of the dramatic art.
He went into the arena with the zest of a trained athlete; and
he was never afraid to try a fall with Voltaire himself. In fact,
it was especially in the hope of a grapple with the French dictator
of the republic of letters that the German kept his loins girded.

Lessing had not only a courage of his own: he had also the
solid learning of his race. He was a scholar, thoroughly grounded
and widely read. He knew at first hand the Greek drama and the
Latin; he was acquainted with Shakespeare and with Lope de Vega
in the original; he was thoroughly familiar with the French theater,
and with the criticisms made against it in Paris itself. Original
as Lessing was, he profited by the suggestions of his predecessors,
and there is no reason now to deny his immediate indebtedness
to Diderot. The French critic it was who pointed out the path,
but only the German critic was able to attain the goal. What
Diderot had happened merely to indicate in passing, Lessing,
with his wider knowledge of life, of literature, and of art,
was able to accomplish. He took up the French rules of theater
with their insistence on the alleged Three Unities, and he was
able to show the baselessness of the claim that they are derived
from the practice or the precepts of the ancients. Then he went
further and pointed out the inherent absurdity of these factitious
restrictions and their fettering effect upon the French dramatic
poet, even when they were kept only in letter and broken in spirit.

Lessing destroyed the superstitious reverence for the French
theories; but he could build up as well as tear down. German
literature was then at its feeblest period; and such original
German pieces as might exist were almost as pitiful as the week
limitations of French tragedy. The German theater was battling
for life; it was barren of plays worthy of good acting; it was
almost as deficient in good actors capable of doing justice to
a fine drama; and it attracted scant and uncultivated audiences
without standards of comparison and therefore with little appreciation
of either the dramaturgic art or the histrionic. Like Aristotle,
Lessing had grasped the complex nature of the dramatic art, with
the necessary correlations of playwright and player; and, like
Aristotle again, he never thought of a drama as a work of pure
literature but always as something intended to be performed by
actors, in a theater, before an audience. The French imitations
Lessing strove to eliminate by substitution,--by providing plays
of his own which should be native to Germany in motive and in
temper, and which might serve as the foundation for a national
drama. He was almost as successful in this constructive effort
as he had been in his destructive labors.

A critic Lessing was, no doubt, but a critic who had the rare
ability to practice what he preached. It at least three plays
he revealed himself as a true dramatist, as a man who had mastered
the craft of play-making, and who could present on the stage
the essential scenes of a struggle between contending forces
embodied in vital characters. The proof of the play is in the
acting always; and Lowell did not hesitate to assert that MINNA
VON BARNHELM and EMILIA GALOTTI act "better than
anything of Goethe or Schiller."
In justification of Lowell's assertion it may be noted that these
two plays are nowadays seen in the German theaters quite as often
as any two dramas of either Goethe or Schiller.

EMILIA GALOTTI and MISS SARA SAMPSON are tragedies
of middle-class life, tragédies bourgeoises, owing
something to the precept of Diderot and owing perhaps more to
the practice of the English dramatists, whom Lessing had also
admired. Although his style is noble and direct, he is not primarily
a poet, with a poet's instinctive happiness in finding the illuminative
phrase. His culture, his formidable instruction, his resolute
thinking, unite to give certain of his dramas a richness of texture
uncommon enough in popular plays. MINNA VON BARNHELM is
a comedy, not tearful exactly, nor yet mirthful, rather cheerful,
even if grave in spirit. Lessing was scarcely every gay, although
he could be witty enough on occasion. His dialogue has sometimes
a Gallic ease, and it has always a Teutonic sincerity. MINNA
is the best of his plays; it is brisk in action, lively in incident,
and ingeniously contrived throughout.

Perhaps the model of which Lessing availed himself unconsciously
when his serious plays were taking shape in his mind, was that
suggested by Molière's larger and later comedies. But
with his practicality and his perfect comprehension of the conditions
of the modern theater, Lessing made one important modification
in the form of the drama which Molière had supplied. Where
the Frenchman, dealing only with the crisis of Tartuffe's career
in Orgon's house, had no difficulty in concentrating the action
into a single day and a single spot, the German, rejecting the
Unity of Time and the Unity of Place, held himself at liberty
to protract the action over so long a period as he might find
advisable, and to change the scene as often as he might see fit.
But Lessing perceived the advantage of not distracting the attention
of the audience by changes of scene during the progress of the
act; and he therefore made his removals from place to place while
the curtain was down. He was apparently the first playwright
who gave to each act its own scenery, not to be changed until
the fall of the curtain again. Here he supplied an example now
followed by the most accomplished playwrights of the twentieth
century.

VI

IN this avoiding of the confusion resulting from frequent
shifting of the scenery before the eyes of the spectators, Lessing
was more modern than either Goethe or Schiller, both of whom--especially
in their earlier dramatic efforts, in the GOETZ of the
one and in the ROBBERS of the other--appeared to hold
that the example of Shakespeare warranted their returning to
the more medieval practice of making as many changes of place
as a loosely constructed plot might seem to require. Lowell suggested
that there was "in the national character an insensibility
to proportion" which would "account for the perpetual
groping of German imaginative literature after some foreign mold
in which to cast its thought or feeling, now trying a Louis Quatorze
pattern, then something supposed to be Shakespearian, and at
last going back to ancient Greece."

Nowadays Goethe's surpassing genius is everywhere acknowledged,--his
comprehensive and insatiable curiosity, his searching interrogation
of life, his power of self-expression in almost every department
of literature. But great poet as he was, a theater-poet he was
not. He was not a born playwright, seizing with unconscious certainty
upon the necessary scenes, the scènes a faire,
to bring out the conflict of will against will which was the
heart of his theme. He lacked the instinctive perception of the
exact effect likely to be produced on the audience, and he was
deficient in the intuitive knowledge of the best method to appeal
to the sympathies of the spectators. In fact, the time came in
Goethe's career as a dramatic poet when he refused to reckon
with the playgoers who might be present at the performance of
his plays,--an attitude inconceivable on the part of a true dramatist
and as remote as possible from that taken by Sophocles,
by Shakespeare, and by Molière. When he was director of
the theater in Weimar he did not hesitate to assert that "the
public must be controlled." A more enlightened tyrant than
Goethe no theater could ever hope to have; and yet little more
than sterility and emptiness was the net result of his theatrical
dictatorship and of his refusal to consider the native preferences
of the Weimar playgoers.

It was Victor Hugo who once declared
that the audience in a theater can be divided into three classes,--the
crowd which expects to see action, women, who are best pleased
with passion, and thinkers, who are hoping to behold character.
The main body of playgoers has always wanted to be amused by
the spectacle of something happening before their eyes; and many
of them, including nearly all women, desire to have their sympathies
excited; but it is only a chosen few who go to the theater seeking
food for thought and ready, therefore, to welcome psychologic
subtlety and philosophic profundity. The great dramatists have
been able to satisfy the demands of all three classes; and OEDIPUS THE KING, HAMLET, and TARTUFFE were popular with the
plain people from their first performance. But Goethe seemed
to care for the approval of only the smallest class of the three;
and only in FAUST did he reveal the dramaturgic skill
needed to devise an action interesting enough in itself to bear
whatever burden of philosophy he might wish to lay upon it.

Even in his early plays, in GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN,
for example, in which there is action enough and emotion also,
there is no felicity of stagecraft. It purports only to be a
chronicle-play; but although afterward reshaped for the stage,
it was not conceived to suit the conditions of the actual theater.
CLAVIGO, however, which is only a dramatized anecdote,
an unpretending improvisation, swift in its action and clear
in its handling of contending motives, is effective on the boards;
and as a stage-play it is perhaps the most satisfactory of all
Goethe's dramatic attempts, trifle as it is after all, devoid
of either poetry or philosophy. IPHIGENIA is a dramatic
poem rather than a play; and EGMONT is little more than
a novel in dialogue. So fraternal a critic as Schiller confessed
that he found IPHIGENIA to be wanting in "the sensuous
power, the life, the agitation, and everything which specifically
belongs to a dramatic work." But if final proof is needed
that Goethe, however various and powerful as a poet, was not
a born playwright, it can be found, outside his own attempts
at dramatic form, in his alteration of ROMEO AND JULIET.
In this he not only modified and condensed both Mercutio and
the Nurse, but he also substituted a tame narrative for Shakespeare's
skillful and spirited exposition by which the quarrel of the
two families was brought bodily before our eyes.

VII

A THEATER-POET Schiller was, even if Goethe was not; yet Schiller's
first drama, the ROBBERS, was not written for performance,--although
it soon found its way to the stage-door, after the poet had somewhat
restrained its boyish extravagance. Schiller rejected the model
he could have found in Lessing's tragedies of middle-class life,
a model too severe for the tumultuous turbulence of the storm-and-stress
period. He followed Goethe, who, in GOETZ, had claimed
the right to be formless as Shakespeare was supposed to be. There
is in the ROBBERS a certain resemblance to the crude Elizabethan
tragedy-of-blood with its perfervid grandiloquence and its frequent
assassination.

In this first play Schiller's stagecraft was primitive and
unworthy; he shifted his scenes with wanton carelessness, and
he let his absurd villain turn himself inside out in interminable
soliloquies. But however reckless the technique, the play revealed
Schiller's abundant possession of genuine dramatic power. The
conflict of contending passions was set before the spectator
in scenes full of fire and action. The antithesis of Moor's two
sons, one strenuously noble and the other unspeakably vile, was
rather forced, but it was at least obvious even to the stupidest
playgoer. The hero lacked common sense, no doubt; but he had
energy to spare; and at the end he rose to tragic elevation in
his willingness to expiate his wrong-doing.

Dramatist as Schiller was by native gift, he was but a novice
in the theater when the ROBBERS was written, and it was
the fitting of that play to the actual stage which drew his attention
to the inexorable conditions of theatrical performance. In his
later dramas, in WILLIAM TELL, for example, and in MARY
STUART, the technique is less elementary and more in accord
with the practice of the contemporary playhouse. But Schiller
appears to have been thinking rather of his readers than of the
spectators massed and expectant in the theater. He seems to have
taken no keen interest in spying out the secrets of the stage.
His plays are what they are by sheer dramatic power, and not
by reason of any adroitness of technique. Indeed, in Schiller's
day the German theater was almost in chaos; and probably he never
saw any satisfactory performance of a dramatic masterpiece, German
or French or English, until he went to Weimar.

Despite his limitations, Schiller was the one dramatic poet
of the eighteenth century; he is to be compared, not with Sophocles
and Shakespeare, the supreme masters, but rather with Calderon
and Hugo. He lacked their conscious control of theatrical effect,
but he had something of their rhetorical luxuriance and their
exuberant lyricism. He was intellectually deeper than the Spaniard
and he was more masculine than the Frenchman. Schiller's influence
on the later development of the drama would have been fuller
if his structure had been more modern and if he had profited
earlier by the example of Lessing, emulating the great critic's
certainty of artistic aim and imitating his rigorous self-control.

But self-control was rarely a characteristic of German poets
in those days of impending cataclysm. Lessing had emancipated
his countrymen from the tyranny of French taste, from the despotism
of pseudo-classicism. Other despotisms survived in Germany, not
in literature but in life itself; and a younger generation was
ardent for the destruction of these survivals from the middle
ages. In Lessing's play the father of Emilia Galotti slew his
daughter to preserve her honor, while the evil ruler who was
responsible escaped scot-free. In GOETZ and in the ROBBERS
the aggrieved hero was ready to turn outlaw on slight provocation,
and to revenge individual injuries on society at large. The ROBBERS
especially had the super-saturated sentimentality of the last
half of the eighteenth century; and it was filled with the clamor
of revolt, which was to reverberate louder and louder throughout
Europe until at last the tocsin tolled in the streets of Paris
and the French Revolution was let loose to sweep away feudalism
forever.

VIII

THE most of the German dramas of this period of unrest were
not intended for the actual theater, although many of them did
manage to get themselves acted here and there. With all their
wild bombast and with all their overstrained emotionalism, they
were not without a significance and a vitality of their own,
a freshness of self-expression wholly lacking on the German stage
before Lessing had inspired it. If these dramas had been controlled
by something of Lessing's self-restraint, if they had been less
excessive in their violence, they might have afforded shelter
for the growth of a dramatic literature native to the soil and
national in spirit. But they were not healthy enough, and they
soon fell into decay; and what did burgeon from their matted
roots was the melodrama of Kotzebue, with its exaggeration of
motive, its hollow affectation, and its tawdry pathos. Kotzebue's
taste is dubious and his methods now outworn; but his play-making
gift is as undeniable as that of Heywood before him or that of
Scribe after him. MISANTHROPY AND REPENTANCE, known in
England as the STRANGER, has caused as many tears to flow
as A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS; and whereas Heywood's
simply pathetic play was known to his contemporaries only in
the land of its language, Kotzebue's turgid treatment of the
same theme was performed in all the tongues of Europe, in Paris
and London and New York as well as in Vienna and Berlin.

Melodrama bears much the same relation to tragedy and to the
loftier type of serious play that farce does to pure comedy.
When we can recall more readily what the persons of a play do
than what they are, then the probability is that the piece if
gay is a farce, and if grave a melodrama. Even among the tragedies
of the Greeks we can detect more than one drama which was melodramatic
rather than truly tragic; and not a few of the powerful plays
of the Elizabethans were essentially melodramas. So also were
some of Corneille's, though they masqueraded as tragedies and
conformed to the rules of the pseudo-classics. Yet it was only
in the eighteenth century that melodrama plainly differentiated
itself from every other dramatic species.

The "tradesmen's tragedies" of Lillo and Moore in
England and the tearful-comedies of La Chaussée and Sedaine
in France had helped along its development; but it was Kotzebue
in Germany who was able at last to reveal its large possibilities.
In the pieces which the German playwright was prolific in bringing
forth there was something exactly suited to the temper of the
times; and this helped to make his vogue cosmopolitan. He was
the earliest play-maker whose dramas were instantly plagiarized
everywhere; and in this he was the predecessor of Scribe and
Sardou. He influenced men like Lewis in England and like Pixérécourt
and Ducange in France. In the works of the Parisian playwrights
there was a deftness of touch not visible in the pieces of Kotzebue,
who was heavy-handed; as Amiel once suggested, it is not unusual
to see "the Germans heap the fagots for the pile, the French
bring the fire." It was this French modification of eighteenth
century German melodrama which was to serve as a model for French
romanticist drama in the nineteenth century.

A century is only an artificial period of time adopted for
the sake of convenience and corresponding to no logical division
of literary history. None the less we are able to perceive in
once century or another certain marked characteristics. No doubt
every century is more or less an era of transition; but surely
the eighteenth century seems to deserve the description better
than most. For nearly three quarters of its career, it appears
to us as prosaic in many of its aspects, dull and gray and uninteresting;
but it was ever a battle-ground for contending theories of literature
and of life. In the drama more especially it was able to behold
the establishment and the disestablishment of pseudo-classicism.

At its beginning the influence of the French had won wide-spread
acceptance for the rules with their insistence on the Three Unities
and on the separation of the comic and the tragic. At its end
every rule was being violated wantonly; and the drama itself
seemed almost as lawless as the bandits it delighted in bringing
on the stage so abundantly. Throughout Europe, except in France,
the theater had broken its bonds; and even in France, the last
stronghold of the theorists, freedom was to come early in the
nineteenth century. Lessing had undermined
the fortress of pseudo-classicism; and the walls of its last
citadel were to fall with a crash at the first blast on the trumpet
of Hernani.